Blood, Sweat & Chrome

The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road

Kyle Buchanan

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780063084346
• eBook ISBN: 9780063084360
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Film & Video

One of Entertainment Weekly's Best Books of 2022!

"New York Times journalist Kyle Buchanan details the bonkers construction of director George Miller's long-awaited and often seemingly-doomed fourth Mad Max movie via testimony from the filmmaker, Charlize Theron, Tom Hardy, and a host of others. The result is an epic and – when it comes to the Theron-Hardy on-set relationship – acrimonious tale no less jaw-dropping than the movie itself." — Entertainment Weekly

A full-speed-ahead oral history of the nearly two-decade making of the cultural phenomenon Mad Max: Fury Road—with more than 130 new interviews with key members of the cast and crew, including Charlize Theron, Tom Hardy, and director George Miller, from the pop culture reporter for The New York Times, Kyle Buchanan.

It won six Oscars and has been hailed as the greatest action film ever, but it is a miracle Mad Max: Fury Road ever made it to the screen… or that anybody survived the production. The story of this modern classic spanned nearly two decades of wild obstacles as visionary director George Miller tried to mount one of the most difficult shoots in Hollywood history.

Production stalled several times, stars Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron clashed repeatedly in the brutal Namib Desert, and Miller’s crew engineered death-defying action scenes that were among the most dangerous ever committed to film. Even accomplished Hollywood figures are flummoxed by the accomplishment: As the director Steven Soderbergh has said, “I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film, and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.”

Kyle Buchanan takes readers through every step of that moviemaking experience in vivid detail, from Fury Road’s unexpected origins through its outlandish casting process to the big-studio battles that nearly mutilated a masterpiece. But he takes the deepest dive in reporting the astonishing facts behind a shoot so unconventional that the film’s fantasy world began to bleed into the real lives of its cast and crew. As they fought and endured in a wasteland of their own, the only way forward was to have faith in their director’s mad vision. But how could Miller persevere when almost everything seemed to be stacked against him?

With hundreds of exclusive interviews and details about the making of Fury Road, readers will be left with one undeniable conclusion: There has never been a movie so drenched in sweat, so forged by fire, and so epic in scope.

Part I

Building a World Gone Mad

Introduction

For 55 million years, the Namib Desert has been where things go to die. Thought to be the oldest desert on the planet, it’s a barren wasteland almost completely devoid of human life, a place where the coastline is still studded with the remains of a thousand shipwrecks.

And in September 2012, it was where Mad Max: Fury Road would crash and burn.

Nearly ten thousand miles separate that south African desert from Los Angeles, but midway through Fury Road’s very long 2012 shoot, plenty of stories about the troubled production had already made their way back to the Hollywood rumor mill. Was it true that the film was wildly behind schedule and over budget because its mercurial lead, Tom Hardy, often failed to show up to set? Had a massive blowup between Hardy and his costar, Charlize Theron, required an outside intervention just so the film wouldn’t collapse?

And what the hell was George Miller making, anyway? Though the director had spent months filming Fury Road in Namibia, the footage he’d sent back to Warner Bros. left many executives freaked out. The dialogue sounded incomprehensible, the action scenes appeared astonishingly dangerous, and since Miller wasn’t working from a traditional screenplay—instead, in an unprecedented move, he had plotted the film out solely through storyboards—studio executives worried that Fury Road would make no sense once it was cut together. If this expensive boondoggle turned out to be a box-office bomb, forget just losing their jobs: They might never work in Hollywood again.

Jeff Robinov, the bald and beleaguered head of Warner Bros. Pictures, had been sending underlings to the desert to check on Fury Road ever since the movie’s June start. But during the last week of September, Robinov himself flew over to Namibia to take control.

The production was based in a massive tent city in the middle of the desert, a troubled oasis where several hundred crew members now waited to learn their film’s fate. The first person Robinov encountered there in the sands was P. J. Voeten, Fury Road’s loyal producer and first assistant director. “We’re going to finish this film with or without George,” Robinov told him.

Under his breath, Voeten muttered, “Good luck with that.”

Eventually, Robinov made his way to Miller, who cuts a deceptively mild figure: At five foot seven, with wavy white hair, twinkly eyes, and a pair of amber-colored teashade glasses, he has the pleasant Australian lilt and chatty disposition of a favorite grandfather. Perhaps because of that, Miller has been underestimated his whole career, with rogue crew members and studio executives frequently trying to seize control from a man who simply will not budge.

Robinov was hardly the first money man to clash with Miller, but on that day in the desert, he threatened to be the very last. Though there were still three months of shooting left on Fury Road and many crucial scenes still to come, Robinov told Miller he would shut the film down early and then laid down an impossible ultimatum: With such limited time left, Miller could either shoot Fury Road’s third-act chase or sacrifice it to film the still-unshot beginning and ending of the movie.

No matter what decision Miller made, the outcome would be disastrous. The director had been imagining his dream project for over a decade and a half, and the head of the studio was about to blow a massive hole through it.

But this was just another catastrophe on a project that was beset with them. Fury Road was one of the most elaborate and difficult shoots in Hollywood history, and the making of the movie stretched over two decades and three studios. Still, over years of countless obstacles that would have prompted almost any other artist to give up, Miller persevered. He could not quit until he had told this story, and what he fought for is now considered by many to be a masterpiece and the finest action movie ever made.

Over several interviews with Miller, I had to ask: How did he keep the faith for so many years when everything was stacked against the making of this film?

“The real answer is you have no choice,” he said bluntly. “I just had to keep going.” Then, as if he were a character from his own movie, Miller added, “You can’t surrender.”

Though the scope of Fury Road is massive, the film’s postapocalyptic plot is boiled down to its barest essence: Nearly the entire movie is told on the run as drifter Max Rockatansky (Hardy) joins forces with the determined driver Furiosa (Theron) to spirit five young sex slaves to safety. Along the way, they are aided by the zealous turncoat Nux (Nicholas Hoult) and pursued across the desert by a staggering armada of vehicles commanded by the warlord Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), who wants to reclaim his harem of “Wives” and murder his rogue lieutenant Furiosa for freeing the young women in the first place.

But while Fury Road initially appears to be a simple car chase stretched to feature length, there is plenty going on underneath the hood, and the subjects that Miller smuggled into all that spectacle were subversive and unexpectedly powerful: How often do you see an action movie that tackles up-to-the-minute issues like environmental collapse, female empowerment, and resource hoarding by the rich? The world here is so detailed and incredibly realized that it resonates well beyond the borders of the frame. A film like Fury Road isn’t just one of a kind—in this era of increasingly bland superhero movies, it’s the sort of film that could probably never be made again.

Many thought Miller couldn’t pull it off, and some of those doubters were even working on the movie. To be fair, by the time Fury Road hit theaters in 2015, Miller was seventy years old and had not directed a live-action film in seventeen years. It had been even longer—three tumultuous decades—since the world had seen a new Mad Max movie, and original series star Mel Gibson became professionally toxic in the interim, requiring a thorough rethink of what Miller had in mind.

And what exactly Miller had in that prodigious mind remained the point of some contention. The confusingly piecemeal way he filmed Fury Road could frustrate his actors, who felt adrift and often clashed with Miller and each other. During the better part of a year spent in the vast, remote desert of Namibia—surrounded by sandstorms, shrieking stuntmen, and insane vehicular mayhem—there was such an emphasis on making this fantasy world feel real that the conflict of the characters even seeped into the actual lives of the cast and crew. You either had faith in Miller’s mad vision or you struggled.

Almost every movie is hard to make, but few movies have a making-of story as wild, long, or difficult as Fury Road, and absolutely none of them turned out as influential and awe-inspiring. There’s no doubt now that the movie is an all-time classic, but an important question still remains: Did Fury Road become great despite being forged in fire, or because of it?

Chapter 1

Eyewitness Accounts of Those Who Survived

In almost every possible way, Mad Max: Fury Road is a movie that should not exist.

It’s the fourth film in a long-running franchise . . . yet it was hailed by critics as one of the most original movies ever made. It’s a big-studio action movie . . . yet it was nominated for Best Picture and won several Oscars.

And while it was a major hit when it was released in 2015, earning $375 million worldwide, Fury Road has only become bigger in the years since: At the end of the 2010s, nearly every major publication—including the New York Times, USA Today, Rolling Stone, and the Los Angeles Times—named it one of the best films of the decade.

With its iconic characters, exhilarating stunt sequences, and incredible ingenuity, it’s only natural to wonder how this modern classic was made. Even A-list auteurs can’t figure Fury Road out: Parasite director Bong Joon Ho has said that the sheer scale of the movie brings him to tears, while Steven Soderbergh put it more bluntly. “I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film,” Soderbergh once said, “and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.”

* * *

Gina Prince-Bythewood (director, The Old Guard) You watch Fury Road, and you’re really pushed back in your seat. Even knowing all the tricks that directors use, you still can’t figure out how he did it.

Tom Hardy (“Max”) It’s Technicolor, surreal, and over-the-top with all these car crashes that are actually happening. It’s magic. I haven’t ever seen anything like it.

Edgar Wright (director, Last Night in Soho) It’s an engine of pure cinema.

Patty Jenkins (director, Wonder Woman) How often do you see something so mind-blowing? First of all, George’s taste is unparalleled—he’s got the edgiest, most unbelievable eye. And this visceral, gripping vitality that comes out of the action is stunning.

Jen Yamato (journalist, Los Angeles Times) It makes me feel more alive just watching it, and that feeling has never gone away as I’ve watched it over and over and over again.

Patton Oswalt (actor) I don’t have words for it—it should just be “holy fucking shit.”

Nia DaCosta (director, Candyman) The audacity of it all! That’s the sort of thing that initially got me into directing—the fact that you could literally do anything—and what George did is to say, “Yes, I’m going to go to the desert in Namibia to make this completely tonally wackadoo movie.” And somehow it fucking works. I never would have been able to pull this movie off. It sounds like hell!

George Miller (director) Every day was physically demanding. There were no soft days. It was very noisy, very dusty, and very arduous.

Robyn Glaser (second assistant director, action unit) No one can say they’ve worked on a movie like Mad Max.

Charlize Theron (“Furiosa”) Hands down, this is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

Jasin Boland (still photographer) I think it was our Apocalypse Now, I really do.

Dane Hallett (key prop maker) You’re not really allowed to make those movies anymore. You’re not allowed to commit to this fucking insanity and get away with it. The studios are too scared.

Sean Genders (senior prosthetic artist) We call it the most expensive independent film ever made.

Doug Mitchell (producer) It was destined, one day, to be what it is today. It’s now in the library of films, but there were umpteen times where it was irrelevant: “Nah, that’s never going to happen.”

Tom Hardy Looking back now, it’s impossible to put into words what being a part of it meant to me. It left me irrevocably changed.

Riley Keough (“Capable”) It was one of the wildest, most intense experiences of my life—to this day. Every moment is so emotional to me.

A...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Cast of Characters
• Part I: Building a World Gone Mad
• Part II: Shoot to Thrill
• Part III: End of the Road
• Acknowledgments
• Sources
• Index
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher